The most important career question: 'What is success?'

• My definition of "success" is doing work you like that allows you to live a life you want.
• For most of us, this is a reasonable and achievable work goal.
• It's also different for each of us — and may change over time.

Given that I'm writing a series about "succeeding at work," I realize I should have started with a simple question:

What is success?

Here's my answer:

"Success" is doing work you like that allows you to live a life you want.

That's it.

It's not "climbing the corporate ladder." Or "achieving X by X date or X age." Or "making X amount of money."

Those and other goals can be part of success for you, if you want. If you have a big goal, setting and achieving smaller, incremental goals along the way can be an effective way to get there.

But the definition of "success" is and should be different for each of us. And one of the hardest things you'll have to do if you want to be successful is to tune out what success is for other people and figure out what success is for you.

For example, Business Insider recently did a survey of 1,800 18-24 year-old members of "Gen Z." Based on this survey, success for a substantial minority of this generation (38%) appears to look something like this:

• Working ~four days a week (or, certainly, less than the standard "40 hour work-week")

• Being able to afford a "middle-class" life and having time outside work to live it

• Having flexibility — specifically, being able to work when and where you want

• Doing work that helps others

Well, members of the minority of Gen Z who want this, I have good news for you! That is a reasonable and achievable definition of success. It is, in fact, similar to my own definition of success when I was your age.

(As I've described, success for me in my early 20s involved travel, adventure, book-reading, book-writing, teaching, and rock-climbing. I didn't manage to crack the "middle class" wage-and-benefits level, but I did pay my own way.)

Of course, as with any form of success, achieving this will require some work on your part.

For example, it will require you to develop marketable skills that are valuable enough to an employer (or clients, if you want to work for yourself) that the employer (or clients) will be willing and able to pay you middle-class wages for four days of work a week and give you the flexibility and autonomy you want.

That may not be easy to achieve, and it may take some time. But it will be vastly easier than if you define success as, say, "becoming a rock star" or "winning a gold medal" or "getting tenure at a prestigious university by age 28."

The reason achieving this success won't be easy, by the way, include:

1) Competition. Many other people, including most Gen Zers, may be willing to work five days a week (or more) for those middle-class wages. For example, a substantial majority of our Gen Z survey respondents (62%) expect to have to work way more than 40 hours per week to earn middle-class wages.

2) Fewer potential employers/clients. Many employers (or clients) may not be willing or able to give you as much flexibility as you want.

So it may take you time to develop your skills and market value to the point where you can command middle-class wages and find employers/clients who will pay these wages and let you work when, where, how, and how much you want.

But many employers are waking up to the advantage of offering more flexibility — namely, that it helps them hire more skilled and effective people! So, if you work at it, you can almost certainly achieve that kind of success.

Your idea of 'success' may change

Of course, you may also find — and here's where it gets tricky — that your definition of success changes over time.

You may find, for example, that the level of compensation that supports a "middle-class life" in your early 20s falls short of what's required to support a family later on. You may find that, eventually, you want the rewards that come with having a profession, as opposed to just a job. And you may find that, over time, you want to achieve specific goals or honors within your profession — and that many of your professional colleagues have the same goals and are working harder and smarter to achieve them than you are.

And, so, as your definition of success changes, you may find that you have to devote more time to your work than you did in your early 20s. More surprising, you may find that you want to devote more time to it. You may even find that, far from being something annoying that gets in the way of your life, your work becomes a rewarding and fulfilling part of your life, something that gives you a sense of purpose and value and that you wouldn't stop doing even if you didn't need the money.

That may sound crazy. But it is also a reasonable and achievable definition of success, especially later in life.

This success, too, will require work and time to achieve. But if you can learn to do one of the hardest things in life there is to do — stop pursuing other people's definition of success and figure out what success is for you — you'll get there.